Looking at Job: Big Ideas

Apologies to Phil Vischer and Mike Nawrocki if that brings up any bad memories (like either of them will ever see this…), but Job is a book with several big ideas that are worth hashing out before ever diving too deep into content. If you are coming to this fresh and aren’t sure what I am talking about, I would suggest backing up to the first post on Job to get an overview of the book.

The story of Job is an intensely human one. Not just because of the 35 chapter examination of the nature of man and his relationship to God, but also because the story is one that most of us can can empathize with. Almost all of us have had some kind of period that we have gone through where the entire world falls apart and don’t really find a cause that we can put our finger on. As such, Job is a book that almost everyone will find themselves in the middle of at some point – either as the protagonist or as the audience. As such, there are several big ideas that have to be looked at in the context of the story.

First big idea: Suffering happens. To everyone. We don’t always know why.

Job was a good dude. A really good dude. He got whacked anyway. The biggest idea to glean from this is that suffering isn’t always tied to what you have done. While it is 100% true that God does judge sin (Leviticus 18:24-29, Leviticus 20, 2^nd Samuel 11, etc), and it is also true that Satan takes advantage of situations to attack those who are vulnerable (1Pe 5:8), there are times where suffering happens simply because the world is fundamentally broken (Genesis 3). If you are going through an incredibly rough patch, Job stands as an answer to the question of “what did I do to deserve this?” The answer may legitimately be “Nothing!” Check your heart, check your circumstances, be honest about whether or not you have done something dumb, and set your heart to seek the Lord.

Second big idea: Righteousness “earns” you nothing.

Job’s righteousness is not sufficient to prevent him from suffering. Job is so confident, he even says that if he could just reason with God, God would see the rightness of Job and all of this would stop (Job 13:20-27). When God shows up, His first question to Job is “where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” God starts his response to Job’s desire with a reminder that God is eternal – He doesn’t just “know” the rules better than Job does, He wrote them. Ezekiel echoes this idea (Ezekiel 14), as does Isaiah (Is 64:6) and Paul (Romans 3 and 7) – God alone is righteous, and we are all sinners who deserve eternal damnation. Ecclesiastes spends a lot of time debating the worth of righteousness over frivolity and wastefulness, only to find that “time and chance happen to them all.” (Ecc 9:11)

Third big idea: Humans handle suffering poorly.

Job is a good dude. We have established that. The book itself says there is no one like him on earth that “fears God and shuns evil”. Yet when God arrives on the scene, Job goes in for a hefty correction – even though Job gets commended for his perseverance by James, the brother of Jesus (James 5:11). Job’s perseverance fails him. Job’s three friends came to him seeking to solve his problem, and in their zeal to solve his problem, they instead became his attackers and antagonists. Instead of giving the man strength, they decided on a root cause and refused to hear otherwise, insisting that Job must have sinned and that is why all this misfortune had come upon him. We see this exact same thing happen in the Gospel of John when Jesus and the disciples encountered a man born blind; “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he would be born blind?” (John 9:2)

Elihu, meanwhile, sits, binding his time, letting the old farts talk, the whole while sitting there waiting to respond – then unloads with both barrels on everybody, mostly in anger. Humans suck at handling suffering. If you know someone who is suffering, be very careful about being too quick to diagnose the problem and assign blame. You may think you are being compassionate in trying to solve their problem, when the reality is that you are simply exacerbating the suffering they are already enduring.

Fourth big idea: Suffering is not inherently redemptive – the end result redeems the suffering, not the other way around.

This is, admittedly, a slightly selfish big idea from the book. The important thing to note is that in chapter 1, verse 20, we get the specific statement that Job “did not sin or charge God with wrongdoing.” The implication here is that charging God with wrongdoing, while distinct from sin (somehow), would have put Job on the wrong side of the story – which means God hasn’t done wrong in doing what He is doing in the story. To borrow a phrase from Bob Sorge, even after the calamity has befallen Job, “God could have left Job alone.” However, the suffering Job suffers exposes something that even he didn’t understand about himself: his possessed expectation that his righteousness had earned him wealth and tranquility rather than it being entirely predicated on God’s goodness. The fact that God shows up and Job immediately repents of the things he has said about his own righteousness and wisdom means that he emerges from his torture in a healthier place than where he started, and God blesses him twice over what he lost after he prays for his friends – Job’s repentence, restored friends, and received blessing are what redeem his time of suffering.

To wit, Job stands in stark contrast to the Apostle Paul and his “thorn in the flesh” – that which Paul requests for the Lord to remove (2Cor 12:7-10) only to be told “My grace is sufficient for you.” Job is submitted to intense suffering, demands for relief and hears nothing; Paul is submitted to suffering, prays for relief, and is explicitly told “no”. The point of Paul’s suffering isn’t to be redemptive for Paul, but for God’s glory to be made known in it – God’s glory being displayed is what redeems Paul’s suffering, not the other way around.

Fifth big idea: God is always in control.

The last big idea to discuss before getting into some stuff that is more granular, is that God is always in control, even when Satan is driving the story. We can see explicitly from the first two chapters of Job that Satan is the one who actually tortures Job, but not only does God claim responsibility (2:3) for Job getting ruined, but Job himself blames God (Chapter 19), and, as we said in the last post, God endorses what Job says of Him (42:7). In the book of Job, God calls the battle (1:8, 2:3), sets the rules for the conflict (1:12, 2:6), and He Himself brings the resolution (38-42). Not for a single instant was God ever “out of control” of the entire situation, nor did Satan ever cross the boundaries God set for the story. No matter how off the rails the situation feels, God is always in control and can always direct what happens next… even if indirectly (Jonah, Hab 1:5-7, Hosea 2:2-15, etc.)

To me, these are the five biggest ideas that you need to wrap your head around before getting too deep into Job. In the next post, I’m going to start digging into the content of the arguments.

–A

~ by xristosdomini on August 8, 2023.